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Widespread outage hits Microsoft email, other apps
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms including Outlook on Thursday. LiveNOW's Andy Mac has more.
Microsoft says it has made progress restoring services following an outage that disrupted several parts of its Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
In an update Friday, the company said it was seeing broad recovery and stability across its services.
In this photo illustration, logo of Microsoft is displayed on November 10, 2026 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
What we know:
As of 7 a.m. Friday, Microsoft reported improvements in mailbox access and the processing of delayed emails in North America. However, Outlook, Copilot and other workplace tools remained disrupted, with some users still experiencing intermittent issues.
The company also extended the delivery window for delayed messages, giving emails caught in the backlog until at least Saturday afternoon to reach recipients before being marked undeliverable.
What they're saying:
"Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilization and adding capacity to improve consistency," the company said.
Later on Friday, Microsoft apologized for the widespread outage.
Microsoft said the disruption involved an "elevated system load" after several servers went offline, overwhelming the remaining infrastructure.
RELATED: Microsoft apologizes for widespread outage, explains what went wrong: ‘Deeply sorry’
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a statement on Friday. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services."
The tech company said the outage was related to a technical issue and not related to cyber security or artificial intelligence.
"The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions," Microsoft continued.
The company said "given the scale of demand," they restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage.
"While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," they explained.
Microsoft said it will provide a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
The backstory:
The widespread outage began Thursday, leaving thousands of users unable to access email and cloud tools. Microsoft said the disruption involved an "elevated system load" after several servers went offline, overwhelming the remaining infrastructure.
During earlier recovery attempts, some servers initially appeared healthy after returning to service but became unresponsive again once they began receiving traffic.
What's next:
Microsoft has not yet announced a full restoration of affected services.
The Source: This story was written with information provided by Microsoft 365 Status social media account, Fox Business and previous reporting by Fox Local. This story was reported from Orlando.